


Here It Is, This Word

by Vinsachi



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 00:02:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17538851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vinsachi/pseuds/Vinsachi
Summary: Billy smiles so rarily.





	Here It Is, This Word

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Вот же это слово](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/452105) by winter storm. 



Billy smiles so rarily, doesn’t at all.

Here is a knife, a sharp pin, two daggers, and bayonet.

The sullen look expresses nothing but dark, dark past, dire pain; cold restraint, the same; a hand that will never tremble, the same.

And the Sharpshooter isn’t as simple as one might suppose, for he is quite… differs from his own image in everyone else’s eyes. He’s just a shade of his past self. But it’s amazing how easy it is to shake a money tree using a single dominant name.

Billy doesn’t care, he knows not why. If worst comes to worst, Billy will cover for him; the Sharpshooter’s hands are all shaking, and Billy takes his gun away, and does all the dirty work by himself. Billy is baselessly reliable.

Billy is baring his teeth. The Sharpshooter has nightmares, he screams so loud as if somebody stabbed him with a knife and turned it several times in his flesh. Like nobody else, Billy knows what this scream is similar to, and, on the one hand, why the hell should he care about all this yelling? But here, the Sharpshooter is waking up, he has been just pulled out of a dream, as if somebody has poured a cold water bucket on his head, he’s gasping as a beached fish, and stares, stares at Billy with eyes wide open and burning with savage fire.

‘I feel it. It’s here, here, breathing down my neck’, he keeps whispering like a madman.

‘Who?’

‘Here, here…’

When Billy puts his hand on his shoulder, the Sharpshooter shuts up and looks into the void in front of him. Over time, he falls asleep again, calmed already. Billy never has even a glimpse of a thought to dump this madman and to take his own path – would he fail to support himself alone, by plunder? Honestly speaking, he doesn’t even call the Sharpshooter ‘this madman.’

Slouching half-lazily on a chair, his thumbs stuck behind his belt, his eyes slightly narrowed, the Sharpshooter is watching Billy’s exercises. They weren’t of special need but sometimes they helped to blow off steam — somebody saying something of ‘bloody Asians’, so what, would it be better to turn a street into a slaughterhouse? To save his breath, to feel how the Sharpshooter claps him on the back soothingly, and to take it out afterwards on the straw-stuffed sacks. First, with the knives, then, hand to hand. The Sharpshooter is observing, without interfering .

Sometimes Billy allows himself a smirk. Sometimes, when the Sharpshooter feels more or less normal, they fight – just for fighting, breaking each other’s faces, or fiercely, just like two youngsters, grappling with each other, rolling in the dust. Having calmed down, but still breathing heavily, Billy watches as the Sharpshooter wipes blood off his lips, and grins.

‘Not bad. For a white man’, he says. The Sharpshooter laughs.

Billy is able to laugh only when he’s drunk. He scarcely resembles himself when he’s drunk, these moments are very rare. He waggles his head, leans heavily on the Sharpshooter, tells stories from his past, swings his arms… Next day, he’s more silent than usual.

It’s impossible to understand at the first try, Billy knows no words. A saloon, a dark corner, and only the Sharpshooter for a company. Sitting here, sharpening knives is good. Daytime, a dusty doorstep, he’s alone - Billy is willing to kill anyone who would dare approaching him. To kill those who will notice the Sharpshooter’s scare, his cowardice. Not because it may put a crimp in what they do, but to make the Sharpshooter feel no shame. Panic – to calm down. To do everything, anything in the world to leave this behind. Billy feels this way, and he doesn’t need any words to name this feeling.

Billy smiles so rarily. But if he does, only to the Sharpshooter.


End file.
